Exercising When Sick

Should You Exercise When You're
Sick?

Spring
is a time of inspiration. Flowers bloom, the days get warmer, and with summer
around the corner, we start to get serious about how we're going to look in our
bathing suits. But the onset of spring is also the final round of the cold and
flu season. Let's look at the best way to survive it while keeping your results
on track.

Whether
or not to work out when you're sick is an age-old dilemma. Since it makes you
stronger and healthier, we tend to think that it will help. And since no one
wants to see their hard-earned fitness gains waste away, we want to keep up
with our program. But when you consider what happens to your body,
physiologically, during an illness and during exercise, you may see how this
seemingly rational train of thought could lead you astray.

Common lore is to go ahead and
exercise if your illness is above your neck and to rest if it's below. This
generality is okay in some circumstances but not for most. So let's dig a
little deeper and come up with the most rational plan for keeping your fitness
goals intact.

What to do during times
of high stress?

You're
most susceptible to illness during times of excessive stress. These include, of
course, the cold and flu season, which is easy to identify because it's when
everyone else seems to be sick. But you're also at risk anytime your lifestyle
changes. Seasonal change and travel are the two major offenders, but anytime
your daily schedule is changing or being disrupted should be treated as a time
of high stress.

When it comes to avoiding illness, the
best defense is a good offense.
Practicing
good everyday habits is a great start. Identifying times of stress comes
next. When you're under stress you certainly don't want to stop working out,
since exercise helps your immune system stay strong. But you should also be
hyperaware of how you're feeling during stress and take it easy anytime you
feel that you might be at the onset of a cold.

When we're about to get sick our bodies' defenses are up, which
can lead to a false sense of well-being. It's quite common to come down with a
cold the day after having "the best workout of the year" or something similar.
This is because your immune system is running overtime, so you feel good. Using
this heightened state to run your best time or set your personal record for
push-ups can deplete your last line of defense and, voila, you're under the
weather. However, if you can identify this feeling and back off of your
workout, your enhanced immune system has a very good chance of staving off the
threatening illness.

What to do when we're
sick

No
matter how careful we are, sometimes we'll get sick anyway. Whether it's a mild
cold or raging fever, at the initial stages of an illness your protocol should
be the same; rest as much as you possibly can and don't do any more physical
activity than is necessary.

To understand why, let's look at an
oversimplified view of what happens to us when we work out:

When you exercise, you induce
stress to your system, which creates body breakdown. This requires your body to
use the nutrients you feed it to help release hormones in order to repair the
damage.

As your tissues are repaired, they become healthier. If this is
done with a plan of inducing stress in the correct manner, you can change their
composition.

The key is rest, which is aided by proper nutrition and
supplementation. The better you can rest, the harder you can work out, and the
more improvements you make. If you don't rest enough, you become deconditioned,
a state known as overtraining.

Now let's look at an oversimplified
view of what happens to us when we are sick:

When you're sick, stress is added
to your system, which creates body breakdown. This requires your body to use
the nutrients you feed it to help release hormones in order to repair the
damage.

As your tissues are repaired, they become healthier. If this is
done with a plan of reducing the stress in the correct manner, you can reduce
the damage to their composition.

The key is rest, which is aided by proper nutrition and
supplementation. The better you can rest, the more resources your body has to
fight the illness. If you don't rest enough, you become deconditioned,
lessening your ability to fight the illness.

When
sick, you are essentially in a state of overtraining. Your body is working
overtime to fight outside stress. As you can see from the above example, adding
further stress, in the form of exercise, will further impede your body's
ability to recover.

Looking
back at the common lore, we must question how exercising with a head cold could
possibly help. While it may be possible to exercise, it doesn't make sense to
do so. You compromise your immune system by using its resources to recover from
the exercise. Even if you have ample resources, it's unlikely that you have
enough in reserve to both stave off the illness and recover well enough from
the workout in order to benefit from it. If you had this much reserve, you
probably wouldn't be sick. The best-case scenario in this situation is to not
get sicker, essentially because you are compromised at both ends. There is
virtually no chance that you will improve your fitness. (Chronic illness has a
different set of circumstances as often exercise is needed to keep long-term
deconditioning from occurring.)

What about losing your
results?

Since
you can't get more fit when you're ill, the best course of action is to
minimize the illness. Rest and good nutrition is the best plan of attack. More
often than not, those who attempt to train through an illness end up prolonging
it, further reducing their state of fitness.

Conversely, a cold rarely lasts longer
than a week. By resting effectively you can often knock this down to a few
days. A few days of rest never hurts your fitness level. And if you're able to
train harder, sooner, then the downtime you've had will be almost instantly
reversed.

Coming off an
illness

This is a point where the common lore
can be applied. As long as you're feverish or achy, your illness is still in
its acute phases. But once you're up and around, those lingering effects above
the neck can often be improved with a workout.

Just
make sure and start back slowly. Low-impact aerobic work such as Slim in 6®
Start It Up! is the best way to test your system. If you feel good,
increase the intensity the next day and so on. But if you feel weak, you've
done too much and have put yourself at risk for a relapse, so back off and
start over.

We often do things with the best of
intentions that affect us in a negative manner. Irrational thinking, like "I'll
lose fitness if I don't work out" or habitual thinking like "I feel better when
I work out," can be hard to ignore. But by using the most basic science, along
with an inkling of restraint, we can get through the cold and flu season with
nary a blip on our fitness radar.

I am a full time Beachbody Coach. I motivate
and guide close to 2,500 Club members and head a team of 11 Beachbody Coaches
who are all committed to helping you reach your goals. Before joining
BeachBody, I was a certified personal trainer for more than a dozen years and
have been a running coach for over 20 years.
Continued...